Jennifer Banks*
Humanity’s future remains as unthinkable as the still-uncolonised galaxy or the enduring mystery of our own births and deaths
A former US listening station on Teufelsberg hill, Berlin. Photo by Lorenzo Maccotta/Panos Pictures
In 2003, Edward Said wrote in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September
2001 and in the context of the United States’ war on terror that
‘humanism is the only, and, I would go so far as saying, the final,
resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that
disfigure human history.’ The moment, he felt, was ‘apocalyptic’, and
the end was indeed near for him; he died of leukaemia later that year.
So why was it humanism that he held to so tightly as war and sickness
cinched time’s horizon around him? Humanism, an intellectual and
cultural movement that emerged in Renaissance Europe emphasising
classical learning and affirming human potential, had been subject to
decades of critique by the time Said was writing this. Among its many
detractors were postcolonialists who argued that humanism’s elevation of
a particular kind of human – Eurocentric, rational, empiricist,
self-realising, secular and universal – had provided thin cover for the
exploitation of large swaths of the world’s population.
But Said, one of the founders of postcolonial studies, hadn’t given
up on the term, despite its imperialist entanglements. He imagined a
humanism abused but not exhausted, an -ism more elastic and
plural, more subject to critique and revision, and more acquainted with
the limits of reason than many humanisms have historically been.
Humanism, he argued, was more like an ‘exigent, resistant, intransigent
art’ – an art that was not, for him, particularly triumphant. His
humanism was defined by a ‘tragic flaw that is constitutive to it and
cannot be removed’. It refused all final solutions to the
irreconcilable, dialectical oppositions that are at the heart of human
life – a refusal that ironically kept the world liveable and the future
open.
At stake in his defence was not only the survival of the humanistic
fields of study he had devoted his academic career to, but the survival,
freedom and thriving of actual people, including those populations that
humanisms had historically excluded. Various antihumanisms had
gradually been eroding humanism’s stature within the academy, but it was
humanism, he believed, with its positive ideas about liberty, learning
and human agency – and not antihumanist deconstructions – that inspired
people to resist unjust wars, military occupations, despotism and
tyranny.
Humanism, however, fell further out of vogue in the two decades that
followed. Humanities enrolments dropped dramatically at universities,
and funding for departments like comparative literature, women’s
studies, religion, and foreign languages got slashed. Increasingly,
however, it wasn’t just the inadequacies of any -ism that were
the problem. It was the subject at the heart of humanism that came under
widespread attack: the human itself. Given that history could be read
as a catalogue of human greed, blindness, exclusions and violence, the
future seemed to belong to someone – or something – else. The humane in
humanism seemed to be missing. Alternative ideologies like antihumanism,
transhumanism, posthumanism and antinatalism
seeped from the fringes into the mainstream, buoyed by their conviction
that they might offer the planet or even the cosmos something more ethical, more humane even, than humans have ever been able to. Humanity’s time, perhaps, was simply up.
In his book The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us
(2023), the American critic Adam Kirsch identifies the contested line
between humanists and non-humanists as one of the defining faultlines of
our political and cultural moment. The debates between them can feel
merely semantic, the stuff of graduate seminars, but the revolt against
humanity is likely to have major implications for our future, Kirsch
argues, even if its prophecies about our imminent extinction don’t come
true. ‘[D]isappointed prophecies,’ he writes, ‘have been responsible for
some of the most important movements in history, from Christianity to
Communism.’ Anyone committed to the prospect of a liveable future should
pay close attention to what’s going on here.
This requires more than a passing glance; it demands the kind of
careful, comparative critique that Said believed humanism inculcated in
both its academic practitioners but also, importantly, in any concerned
citizen of the world. To understand how a humanism like Said’s might be
the only and final ‘resistance we have against the inhuman practices and
injustices that disfigure human history’, it is helpful to do some
comparison readings.
I
might have never put too much stock in a term like humanism if I had
not read around in the transhumanist literature. I came to this work
while researching a book on birth that explored the relationship between
birth, death and the question of a human future. Does humanity have a
future? Do we deserve one? What will that future look like? The answers
to those questions will be determined by many forces – technological,
economic, political, environmental and more – but also by how we
experience and think about our own births and deaths. Despite large
areas of convergence, humanists and transhumanists can end up with
wildly different visions of our future, based on dramatically different
understandings of birth and death, as one can see by comparing how a
novelist (Toni Morrison) and a philosopher (Nick Bostrom) have explored
these themes. Morrison offers us a prophetic celebration of Earthly,
ongoing, biological generation and a future that allows for human
freedom, while Bostrom points us toward a highly controlled surveillance
world order, organised around a paranoid fear of human action, and
oriented toward the pristine emptiness of outer space. Which future, we
should ask ourselves, would we willingly choose?
Let’s look first at Morrison’s vision. Although she refused to
identify as any ‘ist’, Morrison powerfully modelled the kind of tragic
and yet affirmative humanism Said espoused. Her work, like his, bore
witness to humanism’s failures, testifying to some of humanity’s vilest
instincts. But she still affirmed human existence and believed in our
innate capacity to participate in the ongoing and even miraculous
unfolding of reality, generation after generation. This conviction was
powerfully expressed in her Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
delivered in Washington, DC in March 1996.
Her lecture ‘The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished
Expectations’ starts with a dire assessment: ‘Time, it seems, has no
future.’ Time, an entirely human concept, ‘no longer seems to be an
endless stream through which the human species moves with confidence in
its own increasing consequence and value.’ Instead, humans had become
increasingly adept voyagers of deep time; we could think back thousands
of years, far beyond the Coliseum and Pharaohs, acutely aware of the
gifts and burdens our histories have bestowed upon us. It had
simultaneously and paradoxically become impossible, she observed, to
think forward more than a couple of generations. Our imaginations
stumble beyond the year 2030 ‘when we may be regarded as monsters to the
generations that follow us.’
How had this happened?
Eden is not humanity’s future, after all, but its deep, organic, mythic past
The possibility of a nuclear apocalypse, she reminds her readers, had
existed for long enough and with such intensity that there ‘seemed no
point in imagining the future of a species there was little reason to
believe would survive.’ Secularism, she believed, was also to blame for
these shrunken horizons. It was in the modern, secularised West where
progress and change had been ‘signatory features’ that the outlook was
dimmest. Religious ideas about life after death had become associated
with naive superstition and intolerance in such societies. The modern
human imagination had been trained instead ‘on the biological span of a
single human being’. Rather than this awakening us to the richness of
our embodied lives, it had initiated those strange attempts at escape
into the recesses and ‘outer space’ of deep time.
Against these foreclosures of the future, Morrison issued a daring
wager: history was ‘about to take its first unfettered breath’. She
challenged her listeners to allow the years 4000 or 5000 or even 20000
to hover in their consciousness. And she catalogued a variety of
novelists – Umberto Eco, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Cade Bambara and
Salman Rushdie, among others – whose work was ‘race inflected, gendered,
colonialised, displaced, hunted’ and who had courageously imagined a
future for humanity. Their bright hopes paradoxically grew out of
centuries of ancestral dehumanisation – a dehumanisation that had well
attuned them to the reality of human limitations. The relationship
between human possibility and human limits was, for her, the crux of
literature. Through literature, these novelists had communicated their
‘unblinking witness to the light and shade of the world we live in’.
Although her lecture begins with time ‘narrowing to a vanishing point
beyond which humanity neither exists nor wants to’, the lecture ends
with Eden, the garden in which humans began the hazardous project of
human embodiment in the Hebrew Bible. It’s a curious evocation for her
to have ended on. Eden is not humanity’s future, after all, but its
deep, organic, mythic past. Eden is furthermore not where Eve gave birth
to her sons, creating a first human link in the generational lineages
that follow. Childbirth happens in exile, after humanity’s epic fall,
and it’s entangled with the curse set on Eve for her wilful
disobedience. At the same time, God encourages his exilic creatures to
‘be fruitful and multiply’, to stretch their ancestral lines hopefully
into the future. Birth is both a blessing and a curse in Genesis; it is a
perennial opportunity to plant and bear new fruit, but it can happen
only outside paradise, constrained by the consequences of human error.
Still, Morrison concludes, quoting the novelist William Gass, ‘There
are “acres of Edens inside ourselves.” Time does have a future. Longer
than its past and infinitely more hospitable – to the human race.’
In setting Morrison’s critique and
prophecy in relief, against the background of simultaneous
counter-movements in the culture, we can begin to see the acuity and
power of her arguments. Morrison ended with the image of a generative
garden, but over the next three decades Earth’s actual gardens would be
ravaged at a pace unprecedented in human history. Over this same period,
even as the threat of imminent nuclear war receded from the forefront
of public consciousness, new technologies were rapidly developing that
would, emerging transhumanists argued, pose exponentially larger threats
to humanity than those posed by nuclear weapons or environmental
degradation. All these threats were anthropogenic, the result of human
actions. Sentient life had reached a threshold; it would either evolve
into more intelligent, self-optimised, wise and moral forms, or it would
probably destroy itself within centuries, if not sooner. For all their
doomsday predictions, many of these same transhumanists believed that
these emerging technologies, if guided by careful, coordinated
oversight, could create a future in which human suffering and poverty
could be eradicated. Humankind was merely in its infancy; trillions of
people might still be born.
Around the time Morrison delivered her lecture, a Swedish graduate
student based in London got interested in an ‘Extropy’ online discussion
group focused on closely related themes. The group had come together in
the late 1980s around a shared interest in transhumanism, eventually
founding what they called the Extropy Institute. Like Morrison, the
Extropians critiqued the contemporary focus on the biological limits of a
single human life, and the thinking that foreclosed the possibility of
eternal life. Unlike her, they challenged ‘entrenched dogmas concerning
the inevitability of death’ and projected ‘an unlimited lifespan’ made
possible by the removal or transcendence of ‘traditional, genetic,
biological, and neurological limits to the pursuit of life, liberty, and
boundless achievement.’
Where Morrison pessimistically saw a future contracting, they
optimistically saw one expanding. Where she hopefully wagered on a human
future, a future that not only contained humans but that was hospitable
to them, the Extropians were betting on a different story of survival
and ongoing generation, one that might evolve past the biological human
entirely. Boundless expansion and self-transformation would happen not
in the cities we live in, they believed, nor in the human bodies we’d
been born into, but ‘here, in cyberspace, or off-Earth’.
To have any human future at all, argued Bostrom, we’ll need to wrest control of evolution
That Swedish student who joined Extropy was Nick Bostrom,
now a bestselling philosopher, director of the Future of Humanity
Institute at the University of Oxford, and a thinker who has influenced
such intellectual luminaries as Peter Singer and Stephen Hawking, and
such business leaders as Elon Musk
and Bill Gates. He made headlines in early 2023 for racist comments
he’d posted via the Extropian listserv in 1997, a time and place in
which he says contributors were having ‘freewheeling conversations about
wild ideas’. In a series of academic papers and public presentations
over the following decades, Bostrom articulated a less freewheeling
transhumanism than that expressed by the early Extropians – a
transhumanism characterised as much by fear as by feverish anticipation.
Yet, for all its carefully worded and amply sourced delivery, this body
of work has consistently exhibited an aversion to many forms of
biological human life that can lead in quite dangerous directions.
Bostrom has been called a eugenicist, a broad label he repudiates
while admitting that ‘I would be in favour of some uses and against
others.’ His work, however, has long and unabashedly emphasised the
upsides of careful and selective human breeding, a selectivity he
believes could be favourable to our species collectively and in the long
term. In the paper
‘The Future of Human Evolution’ (2004), he argued that, in order to
have any human future at all, we’ll need to wrest control of evolution.
Technological advancements, he warned, could set in motion ‘freewheeling
evolutionary developments’ that might make possible the unlimited
enhancements of human life, but they could also ‘lead to the gradual elimination of all forms of being that we care about’.
The potential dystopian catastrophe on the horizon is not so much
that we will merge with machines or even be replaced by machines, but
that these will be the wrong kinds of machines, machines without any of
the consciousness, altruism, meaning or purpose we associate with being
human. They would endanger what he calls ‘eudaemonic living’ and such
‘useless’ behaviours, ‘flamboyant displays’ and ‘hobbyist interests’ as
joking, writing poetry, hosting parties, taking vacations, wearing
fashionable clothes, and playing sports. None of these activities offer
much competitive, evolutionary advantage; they are fitness
inefficiencies. While eudaemonic agents are busy writing poetry and
taking their vacations, the more single-mindedly competitive
non-eudaemonic agents, either human or transhuman, will likely be
expropriating the matter, space and sunlight they need to survive.
Evolution’s default trajectory probably runs toward this dystopian
future, Bostrom gambles, but we should resist that trajectory; the
eudaemonic agents, even if they don’t stand any evolutionary chance, are
valuable. We want those human agents or values in our future. Existence
would be less without them. This is the humanism that runs through the
transhumanism Bostrom develops, but it is consequentially different than
the humanism Morrison articulated, and the distinctions deserve close
scrutiny.
To begin with, Morrison and Bostrom
have very different understandings of what death is and how it might be
experienced. Morrison, again, had criticised secularism for shrinking
down human life to an exclusively biological scale. At the same time,
she confronted and even accepted death as a biological limit. Life goes
on after death, she believed, but the dead affirm human life more than
they transcend it or reject it, as the ghosts who haunt the living in
her novels make clear.
These weren’t just abstract propositions for her. In 2015, she told a
reporter about a near-death experience she’d had decades earlier. ‘I
left my body and I was only eyes and mind,’ she reported. ‘I could think
and I could see. I didn’t try to speak because I was so fascinated with
this experience.’ That death felt like a liberating weightlessness, and
as much as she didn’t want to revert to weight, she tried to return to
her body because she ‘had kids’ whom she needed to get back to. Death
and the afterlife were where her responsibilities to the living easily
trumped the liberatory weightlessness of a bodiless intelligence.
In contrast, the transhumanist project is one in which biological
death ultimately no longer exists as a limit. Survival and longevity,
both individual and collective, are the goals, as is evidenced in many
transhumanists’ belief in a future of uploaded minds but also by their
interest in cryonics. Through cryonics, our individual bodies and their
intelligences can be preserved. But the preservation of human life is
also a shared, collective project. If we do survive as a species,
Bostrom predicts that it will be as a proactively protected minority
among a vast proliferation of intelligent agents. Our continuing
existence will be subsidised by a tax on the non-eudaemonic agents;
we’ll be afforded an ‘affirmative action’ that is put in place by a
deliberate ‘social sculpting’ of conditions.
Morrison’s and Bostrom’s parallel accounts of birth also reveal
clashing understandings of what a human life is. Biological birth is
constitutive of the human experience for Morrison. It is central to her
work. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), begins in the doomed pregnancy of an 11-year-old girl who has been raped by her father, and her last novel, God Help the Child (2015), ends in the hopeful pregnancy of a young woman with a painful family past. In the middle of her oeuvre sits Beloved
(1987), a book with one of the most incandescent birth scenes in
literature, a scene followed by a terrible sequence of events. Birth in
her work is creaturely, embodied, gendered, graphic, bloody, sexual and
pleasurable. Her characters grasp the miracle and beauty of their own
births, but they also struggle with birth’s fraught contexts and bodily
costs.
A technocratic class could be strongly if selectively pro-natal
It’s on the topic of childbirth that the distinctions between
Morrison’s understanding and Bostrom’s are most stark. Like Morrison,
Bostrom grasps that a human future depends not only on the survival of
existing people but also on the birth of new sentient beings. Our human
future, he has argued, is limited both by people’s disinterest in having
children, but also by the slowness of biological reproduction, which
involves close to a year of gestation in another person’s body followed
by roughly 15 years until sexual
maturation. If people truly wanted to maximise their reproductive
capacities, he argues, they’d be donating as much of their sperm and
eggs to banks as humanly possible. Or they’d stop using any forms of
birth control.
If cultural evolution, however, could progress more quickly than
biological evolution, Bostrom posits that a ‘dominant meme set favouring
plentiful offspring and opposing all forms of birth control’ might
emerge. Technology is often associated with programmes intent on
reducing the number of births – through, say, birth control,
sterilisations or abortions – but here we can see how a technocratic
class could be strongly if selectively pro-natal. Technology, Bostrom
argued, could reduce birth’s biological costs and limits, and open the
possibility of our boundless proliferation. Reproduction could become
asexual and instantaneous. Most mating rituals – such ‘flamboyant
displays’ as sports, poetry, joking and dancing – would no longer serve
any evolutionary function and would likely be replaced by something like
auditing firms that assess our reproductive fitness. In such a future,
birth would not necessarily involve the emergence of newborn,
undeveloped people. We could acquire the capacity to reproduce ourselves
immaculately, making adult duplicates that would be constrained by no
maturational latency. This, it seems, would be a pro-natalist world
without sex, pregnancy or children – a reality in which we’d be like
both God and Adam in Genesis, creator and created unified at last, free
of any pregnant, cursed and paradise-wrecking Eve.
Bostrom’s solution to safeguarding the human ‘thing’ amid these
reproductive revolutions involves wresting control of evolution and
preventing the emergence of mutations that would heavily favour
non-eudaemonic life. For digital uploads, this could be done through a
series of ‘verifications’. For biological uploads, it could be done by
scanning for mutations with advance gene technologies and by
reproductive cloning. If this amounts to a sweeping eugenics project
focused on saving humanity from itself, Bostrom seems reconciled to its
moral downsides.
To oversee such an ambitious and complex project, he argues, humanity
would need a ‘singleton’, a ‘global regime that could enforce basic
laws for its members’. This singleton would be coordinative and stable,
and its rule uncontested. It could take different forms – democratic or
dictatorial, moral or machine – but it would absolutely depend on
transparency, on being able to see into the lives of all sentient
beings, to observe their actions but also such intimate details as their
genetic codes.
In the paper
‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’ (2019), he provides further clues as
to what such a ‘High-tech Panopticon’ might look like. Everyone would be
fitted with a ‘freedom tag’, he explains, an appliance ‘worn around the
neck and bedecked with multidirectional cameras and microphones’. This
would be a crucial piece of ‘preventive policing’ in a system of
‘turnkey totalitarianism’, which would of course come with its own
considerable risks. But those risks just might be worth it, he
challenges his readers to see, if they can save us from the threat of
massive civilisational destruction wrought by one of our fellow humans
gone rogue.
If this is our future, do we really want to live to see it? In Morrison’s words: ‘No wonder the next 20 or 40 years is all anyone wants to contemplate.’
The word ‘colonise’ comes up a lot in
the transhumanists’ writings; they dream of colonising outer space – a
place that appears empty and ripe for possession. But the global
surveillance regime Bostrom imagines also entails an invasion of every
corner of our inner lives as well. Here we can see how far we have
travelled from Said’s postcolonial humanism, or Morrison’s humanism of
the displaced, both of which always prioritised the rights of individual
human actors, balancing them with responsibility, care, weight and
limits, but never losing sight of freedom’s constitutive role in any
sane society.
Transhumanism may well be the wave of the future; we are surely
several steps along its path already. In such a future, Bostrom’s
‘eudaemonic agents’ might read Morrison’s lecture as yet another
disappointed prophecy, but one that remains strangely resonant. Her
humanism of the displaced would accrue eerie relevance after the entire
human species is colonised and left to linger on as a curious species of
useless hobbyists, subsisting on the altruistic but reluctant patrimony
of superintelligent, non-biological beings.
But the future remains before us, as unthinkable as the farthest
reaches of our still-uncolonised galaxy, or the startling mystery of our
own births and deaths. I like to believe there’s still time to salvage
whatever sane humanisms we can from the wreckage of modern history, to
practise Said’s ‘exigent, resistant, intransigent’ arts, and to
vindicate Morrison’s prophecy. The future, I hope, will remain
hospitable to our species and to our children. The year 2030, the one
that Morrison said our imaginations stumbled beyond, beyond which ‘we
may be regarded as monsters to the generations that follow us’, is now
just six short years away.
* Is senior executive editor for religion and the humanities at Yale University Press. She is the author of Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth (2023). She lives in New England.
Fonte: https://aeon.co/essays/the-future-of-humanism-from-toni-morrison-to-nick-bostrom?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=7ad343d34c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_01_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-fc476d9131-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
